Contents
1 The Meaning of Meaning 1
2Magical Rhetoric 26
3Ontological Rhetoric 49
4Objectivist Rhetoric 76
5Expressivist Rhetoric 103
6Sociological Rhetoric 130
7Deconstructive Rhetoric 163
Afterword: Critical Reflections 193
References 201
About the Author 204
Index 205
1
Th e M e a n i n g o f M e a n i n g
What we believe about words influences the ways in which we live our
lives, what we think and say and do. Notice that I’m not referring to
our uses of language: it’s obvious that speaking, writing, listening, and
reading have consequences for our lives. What I’m suggesting is rather
less apparent: attitudes we have, assumptions we make, beliefs we hold,
mostly tacit and unexamined, about what language can do for us, how
language works, its connections to the world, the reliability of meaning, the truth-value of different kinds of statements, all affect our lives
just as much as, and perhaps even more deeply than, our actual usage.
Anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir, known for his insights into
the relativity of representation across languages, argued the error of
supposing that “one adjusts to reality without the use of language” and
insisted that the “real” world is “to a large extent unconsciously built
up on the language habits” of different groups of people. No two languages, he writes, “are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality” (Sapir 1964, 69). Sapir’s observations
in linguistics (the study of language) are pertinent also for rhetoric (the
study of discourse). That is, what he argued regarding different assumptions about words and reality in different languages anticipates similar
distinctions among the multiple, complexly interwoven discourses, or
communication practices, that compose social experience in any one
language—domestic discourses (the verbal routines of everyday life),
religious discourses, scientific, legal, political, medical, artistic, educational, scholarly, and other discourses. These discourses are themselves
different worlds of words, albeit within a single language, and they feature, some more self-consciously than others, not just distinct vocabularies, syntactic styles, and registers, but different views of what C. K. Ogden
and I. A. Richards (1923) called “the meaning of meaning”—how things
are named, what (if anything) is to be regarded as reliably “true,” what
counts as “proof,” how the literal is distinguished from the figurative,
who can speak authoritatively, what knowledge is and how it’s achieved,
DOI: 10.7330/9780874219364.c001
2 C . H . K n o b l a u ch
and myriad other questions. In the most self-conscious of these discourses—religious, legal, or scholarly, for example—one commonly
finds competing rhetorical theories vying for authority, with significant
consequences attending the ebb and flow of alternative points of view.
Ask a Catholic and an Anglican theologian about their contrasting views
of the doctrine of transubstantiation, or two lawyers about the “intent”
of the framers of the US Constitution, or two literary critics about their
readings of “Young Goodman Brown,” and conflicts regarding not just
meaning but also the meaning of meaning will be quickly apparent.
M e a n i n g a n d E v e ry d ay L i f e
But let’s begin more simply with the familiar discourses of everyday life
and consider the tacit rhetorical assumptions of a couple of ordinary
Americans whom I will call, for ease of reference, George and Louise.
Friday morning, George comes down to breakfast and the newspaper,
observes while pouring milk on his cornflakes that the carton says “sell
by September 15,” which was two days ago, and, fearing the milk may
be spoiling, plays safe and empties the carton in the sink. He reads a
front-page story on a bond proposal to fund new buildings in his local
school district and accepts the objectivity of the report along with the
display of evidence supporting the need for new taxes to pay for the
borrowing. He’s unhappy, however, about Hispanic “aliens” driving up
enrollment, and also with school programs that seem to put “multiculturalism” ahead of learning English. Turning to the editorial page, he
finds a piece on global warming to be mere opinion, unsubstantiated
by facts, its author melodramatic, and decides to withhold judgment
until dispassionate science quiets the noise of discordant voices. As for
the ad on page 6 hawking “eye-catching cosmetics,” he recognizes the
manipulative play of words, smirks briefly at the ad’s fictions of beauty
and sexuality, which he knows were conjured for commercial advantage,
and dismisses its claims.
Reaching his office building later in the morning, he glances at the
sign in the elevator warning not to exceed a limit of twelve occupants,
takes it as an engineer’s appraisal, casually estimates the number of his
fellow travelers, and rides confidently to his workplace. He spends part
of his work time writing proposals to potential business customers that
detail how his consulting firm can troubleshoot their management practices and present software solutions. He is confident that his statements
are accurate, unbiased, clear, and true, as professional writing is supposed to be, and he trusts that the precision of the language will allow
The Meaning of Meaning 3
the document to have contractual force if his firm’s bid is accepted.
Arriving home that afternoon, he sorts his mail, saving a notice of jury
duty in two weeks and throwing away a breathless proclamation that he
has won a Caribbean cruise, not bothering to open the official-looking
envelope. He listens to a phone message from his mother but dismisses
her familiar complaint that he “never calls” as an unreasonable plea
for attention. In the evening, he watches the televised hearing on a
Supreme Court nominee, marking the candidate’s views on the first and
second amendments. Before bedtime, he amuses himself with a history
of the Crimean war; he rarely reads novels and doesn’t like poetry. First
thing Saturday morning, George, a devout Catholic, goes to confession
at his church, admits to the priest that he has failed recently to “keep
holy the Sabbath day,” and earnestly recites the requisite Hail, Marys and
Our Fathers as penance, confident that he has been forgiven. On the
way home, he notices a traffic sign saying “No U Turn.” He makes a U
turn anyway to park in front of his house, interpreting the meaning of
the sign as “don’t turn unless you’re sure there is no oncoming traffic.”
Louise follows similar routines, motivated (in part) by equally tacit,
occasionally different, assumptions about language. She reads the sale
date on the milk carton as an approximation only and decides to keep
her milk, sees the bond issue article as an argument motivated by the
political slant of the newspaper, and approves the global warming editorial, impressed by the urgency of the writer’s prose. She glances at a
letter to the editor in which the writer refers to Palestinian militants
as “freedom fighters,” a label with which she disagrees strenuously,
believing that the militants are just plain terrorists. Like George, she
sees a cautionary notice in her workplace elevator but regards it not
as an example of engineering discourse but as a legal statement protecting the manufacturer from liability if the elevator fails when too
fully loaded. She is skeptical about the safety of elevators and often
climbs the stairs to her office. She spends part of her workday writing
an online human resources newsletter that relies on a friendly, personal touch to maintain a positive image of her company while giving
employees valuable information in user-friendly language supported by
clever graphics and humorous anecdotes. She has always been grateful to her ninth-grade English teacher for giving her the grammatical
proficiency that has made her so successful in her job. Even her diary
entries are carefully crafted. After work, she sorts her mail, planning to
query an official notice that her electric bill payment is late, worrying
about how her mother’s letter complaining of loneliness illustrates her
failures as a daughter, and opening the same notice George received
4 C . H . K n o b l a u ch
about a Caribbean cruise package, just in case. Her brother emails that
evening, promising to come soon for a visit. She responds with the requisite expressions of eager anticipation, but she knows that he rarely follows through and she isn’t particularly interested in seeing him anyway.
Saturday morning, she heads for the beach, following directions on her
GPS. A sign prohibiting U turns obliges her to go around the block to
reach the freeway, which she willingly does because the law is the law.
There may be little, if any, articulate awareness of language directly
motivating what George and Louise say, understand, or do. Like the rest
of us amidst our ordinary routines, they probably find just thinking to
be challenging enough without also consciously thinking about their
thinking. Yet they are immersed in language, and their thoughts as well
as actions are influenced by a rich array of beliefs and assumptions about
words. The beliefs come from lifelong interactions with other people
(whoever pointed to a mooing creature and called it a cow “explained”
to them that language can name things), from their schooling, including Louise’s helpful ninth-grade teacher, and from their practical
experience of the world, an experience that has been preshaped, to a
greater extent than they probably realize, by their cultural background,
language included. What they believe comes to them as settled understanding rather than theory or argument, mostly from the European
inheritance of linguistic and rhetorical speculation that has served for
centuries as the repository of our cultural common sense about language and discourse. It would take many pages to explain the details and
nuances of this common sense, even limited to the thoughts and actions
described above, but a sampling of its axioms should be sufficient to
make the point. The most important belief George and Louise share
is that language enables people to name, experience, organize, manage, and
interact with realities that are different from and “outside” of language, including a world beyond the self (other people, human institutions, nature)
and also a world within the self (feelings, ideas, memories, fears, hopes,
imaginings). They presume that language represents these worlds and
enables us to function within them. The warning on the milk carton
doesn’t cause milk to spoil. Rather, milk spoils, and the warning predicts
approximately when it will happen. Louise’s GPS directions to the beach
don’t create the road system; they only offer a symbolic rendering and
convenient instruction about the best roads to take. For George and
Louise, things precede the names we give them: real money underlies taxes
and bond proposals; physical heat gives meaning to words like warming
and cooling; actual cosmetics come before the ads that promote them. It
follows, then, that the truth and accuracy of language involve a correspondence
The Meaning of Meaning 5
between words and the worlds to which words refer. George’s professional
writing names problems that really exist in a potential client’s business
operations, and it offers solutions whose validity and practicality can be
objectively demonstrated. Louise’s representations of her company, and
her HR advice to employees, may be judged as true or false by matching
them to employees’ actual experience. Louise’s electric bill is inaccurate because she has paid it. Substance is always more important than form.
George and Louise don’t use the word rhetoric very often, but when they
do, it’s a disparaging reference to language without substance, such as
the advertising language George scorns as he reads the cosmetics ad.
Louise exploits the clever graphics in her desktop publishing program,
but she believes that her PR language is substantial, not mere rhetoric,
because it offers real information; it is user-friendly but not misleading
or manipulative.
George and Louise also believe in common that language enables
communication. They communicate with family, friends, business associates, public institutions, service providers, even supernatural beings
in George’s case, generally confident that what they say is understood.
People also communicate with them through talk and through a variety
of media, including television, Facebook, e-mail, text messages, blogs,
books, newspapers, telephones, letters, business memos, and official
documents. They are satisfied that the interchanges, the sending and
the receiving, create and maintain valuable, or at least useful, human
relationships. George’s business writing not only speaks the truth by
naming problems and solutions, but it also communicates that truth to
a potential client and makes a promise that his company will perform
effectively in accordance with the statements in the proposal. The writing must be clear and technically correct, however, in order to be reliable. Clarity and correctness assure translucent communication, resulting in
social bonds that enable the mutually beneficial conduct of commerce
and daily life. Of course, because of the prior belief that words are subordinate to things, both George and Louise understand that actions speak louder
than words. George’s business contract is a promise, but it doesn’t in itself
get the work done. Louise believes that she and her brother know and
relate to each other partly as a result of their ability to communicate,
but she also knows that what her brother says in his e-mail message must
be contextualized by earlier failures to follow through with actual visits.
More generally, what people say must always be evaluated by reference to what
is “actually” the case. That’s how we tell the difference between truth,
error, and deceit, not to mention the subtler difference between deceit
and that socially strategic but ethically complex misrepresentation
6 C . H . K n o b l a u ch
that enables Louise and her brother to maintain a sibling relationship
despite the fact that he doesn’t really travel to see her and she doesn’t
really care. Most of the time, words need to be interpreted, not just taken at
face value, depending on how much we know about the speaker’s intentions and about the communicative context. George and Louise draw
different conclusions from the message in the elevator and partly (but
only partly) base their actions on what they read. George believes that
his mother’s complaint about his never calling fails to match the reality of his frequent-enough calls, so he comfortably interprets her statement either as erroneous (in her case, forgetful) or as communicating
something different from what it actually says, namely that his mother is
lonely. Both George and Louise believe that we cannot only match language to factuality but that we can look through a verbal statement to perceive
the intent of the person who makes it. They both “know” what their mothers
mean, and what the elevator signs mean, and they confidently, though
differently, appraise the truth-value of each.
For Louise and George, different statements have different truth-value,
and they trust them more or less depending on the ways in which they
are classified and ranked. George’s hierarchy of statements begins with
the Word of God. He believes that there are sacred utterances, like the Bible,
that speak to human beings with divine authority and also that there are specialized human utterances that have the power to affect supernatural or divine
agencies, including prayers and rites such as Catholic confession. George
finds the authority of the newspaper’s front-page stories more compelling than the editorials and the editorials more persuasive than the
advertisements. The letter announcing his entitlement to a Caribbean
cruise is at the bottom of the hierarchy, not just manipulative but deceitful. His mother’s message is more reliable than the cruise letter because
it doesn’t lie but less reliable than the newspaper because his mother’s
message is more influenced by personal bias. He finds, as most people
in our culture probably do, that there is more truth-value in “realistic” writing, like history, than in fiction writing, that prose is more reliable than poetry,
and that argument is more reliable than narrative. Louise's hierarchy makes
room for the value and usefulness of personal, not just "objective," writing because the sincerity of personal writing assures the reliability of its
statements. She believes that writing can portray the self and connect with
the inner beings, the selves, of others. Whether she is writing in her diary,
communicating with her mother, or informing her colleagues at work,
she has confidence that sincerity is a basis for authenticity, that statements “from the heart” have more value than rhetorical manipulations
of seeming objectivity. Louise recognizes that the apparent detachment
The Meaning of Meaning 7
of front-page articles may conceal a newspaper’s political and mercantile agendas, just as the caution sign in the elevator can be more protective of the manufacturer than the riding public, so she interprets both
with more skepticism, less trust, than George does. The passionate conviction of the global-warming argument gives its author integrity: she
knows where the writer stands. Of course, Louise isn’t invariably skeptical about objective narrators. For example, she does not read ulterior
motives into the sign prohibiting U turns, accepting the authority of
this particular civil discourse without presuming to retain any interpretive license. George, by contrast, regards a commandment to keep the
Sabbath as different from a commandment to avoid U turns, although
the differential regard is more likely a consequence of rationalized
self-interest than a parsing of the degrees of authority implicit in religious and civil discourses. Beliefs about language, whether Louise’s or
George’s or our own, do not have to be philosophically consistent with
each other, or consistently applied, and they are always modified by
other complexities of human motive and behavior.
Still more beliefs and value-laden assumptions can be mined from
this brief encounter with George and Louise. Both of them agree that the
primary value of literacy, the ability to read and write, is mainly practical, allowing the deployment of language skills for social and economic advantage. George
clearly believes, with many Americans, that “foreigners” should speak our
language if they are going to live in our country. Louise believes that language
is comprised of building blocks (syllables, words, sentences, paragraphs) that are
joined together to form ever-more-elaborate statements, and that teaching reading
and writing requires learning to manipulate the building blocks from simplest to
most complex. She thanks her ninth-grade teacher for these insights. It is
likely that both George and Louise believe that fundamental realities are
the same around the world regardless of language and other cultural differences,
that talk is cheap, that really important public documents—contracts, laws,
medical records—are reliable, and that immoral writing can corrupt the young
and/or ignorant. One could go on, but my concern is only to underscore
the observation with which I began: what we believe about words influences the ways in which we live our lives. Every statement identified by
italics in the preceding paragraphs constitutes an axiom from the cultural common sense of the West regarding language and discourse. It
belongs to a dispersion of beliefs, values, assumptions, ideas, opinions,
practical lore, superstitions, and fragments of formal theory accrued
over many centuries, generally below the radar of conscious attention,
working in concert (and even in contradiction), to reassure George,
Louise, and the rest of us that we can all rely on speech acts. The
8 C . H . K n o b l a u ch
statements, taken together, comprise a “story” about language and discourse, or rather a collection of stories, an “anthology,” whose overlapping themes and narratives preserve a multifaceted picture of communication in our cultural memory. While the stories portraying these beliefs
include analytical arguments from linguistics and rhetoric, they are not
invariably scientific, consistently theoretical, internally consistent, logical, or even fully articulate. They come from the West’s mythico-religious
traditions as well as from philosophy, and from experiential lore as well
as disciplined knowledge. Their treatment of shared themes varies dramatically from one to another without the demands of proof or consistency expected from scientific or other argumentative discourse. No
one story in the anthology has the standing to refute another; their rival
accounts simply offer a plurality of understandings. That’s why the idea
of story more effectively conveys the nature of our common sense about
verbal communication than the idea of theory or argument.
The stories function in much the same ways as those in other areas
of our cultural knowledge, such as our understanding of what it means
to be American, of what comprises the American Dream. We can recall,
with varying degrees of self-consciousness, stories about immigration,
from the Mayflower to Ellis Island, about revolt against European tyranny, about hard-won political and religious freedoms, about Westward
expansion, about the Blue and the Gray, about keeping the world safe
for democracy, about progressing from rags to riches through self-­
reliance, pragmatism, and industry. Taken together, the stories identify
and claim to validate “our” shared cultural heritage while also, in their
diversity, evoking the complexities, discordances, and irreconcilable differences that make up the American experience. Different individuals
and groups emphasize different stories, judging some true and others
false, or some meaningful and others not. Not everyone agrees that all
the stories are indeed common sense, as, for instance, those that relate
mistreatment of Native and African Americans, or those that question
whether America is truly a land of opportunity, or those that describe a
separation of church and state. As an anthology, the stories reveal not a
seamless unity of understanding but a compendium of viewpoints represented in differing treatments of recurring themes. They serve to legitimate those viewpoints, not only providing intellectual and emotional
coherence to particular ways of seeing the world but also providing their
tellers and listeners with political leverage in the ongoing negotiation of
that group’s standing or privilege. In general, stories shape the vagaries
of actual experience in all areas of cultural life into ideological wholes,
confirming fictions that offer historical context, personal and group
The Meaning of Meaning 9
identification, shared assumptions and values, and rationales for, as well
as confidence in, the reasonableness of actions judged to be consistent
with their perspectives. The cultural common sense they narrate is pervasive, self-evident, pragmatically effective, immune to falsification, and
psychologically necessary for maintaining familiar pictures of the world
and routines of human interaction.
Common sense is also, of course, to paraphrase Albert Einstein, the
historical record of our prejudices. It is grounded in our oldest, or simplest, or most concrete, or most familiar, or most self-centered experiences (like “the sun rises in the east”), and because it is so serviceable, we
generally accept it as authoritative. Yet it is also, in its familiarity, uncritical, and in its faithfulness to local perspective not only limited by that
perspective but also unable to sympathize with alternative points of view,
finding them wrong, ignorant, or meaningless. Returning to the issue
of common sense about language and discourse, Louise’s and George’s
beliefs reveal the influence of narrow perspectives whether they disagree
with each other, for example, about the efficacy of religious discourse or
share the same views while lacking awareness of vantage points available
from other stories in the anthology. Consider the most important axiom
they accept in common: the assertion that language names a preexisting world. This belief is neither timeless, nor self-evidently true, nor reliably confirmed by experience, nor unopposed by plausible (if not always
intuitively sensible) alternative arguments. The story that relates it has
a formal philosophical history, but while it enjoys considerable prestige in the repertory of narratives inscribing our common sense, it does
not exhaust Western insight into the relationship between language
and reality. To name just one alternative story (shortly, I will introduce
more), some philosophers have argued that our sensory experience is
already a human interpretation of the physical exteriority surrounding
us, that even initial perception, let alone the processes of conceptualization and naming, serves to constitute (instead of mirroring or reflecting)
the “reality” it presents to us. Words don’t point to the world in this view;
rather, they make it for us, presenting a “reality” that is comprehensible
as reality because it is rendered in human terms. This is a transcendental, or romantic, story about meaning, while the more popular story is
classical and metaphysical. For many people, and probably for George
and Louise, the transcendentalist narrative is less intuitively familiar
than the much older account of an intrinsically coherent world that the
eye “sees” and language points to. But as later chapters will reveal, it has
had a concrete, historical impact on the thinking, speaking, and acting
of people who have lived according to the truth of its statements.
10 C . H . K n o b l a u ch
R h e to r i c a l P e r s p e c t i v e s : N a m i n g
I’ve argued so far that what we believe about language influences how we
live our lives. Now I’d like to add that conscious thought about language,
whether in the domestic discourses of everyday life or in more theorized professional discourses, can be beneficial for those who make the
effort. Close reading and formal thinking about the stories that articulate our common sense can allow us to cultivate a curious, reflective,
and critically distanced attitude toward the entire anthology as opposed
to merely believing or disbelieving individual stories according to the
accidental preferences of our experience, upbringing, or education.
It means developing a similar attitude toward storytelling itself, appreciating its power to beguile no less than inform anyone who remains
uncritical of its crafted illusions of certitude, coherence, and sufficiency.
While one cannot live apart from stories, or achieve a transcendent location outside all narrative perspectives, reflective readers can retain the
capacity to evaluate the claims of different stories, read new stories as
though they too might have the potential to be true, and change their
preferences in response to new ideas and experience. The axioms of
common sense we’ve encountered so far belong to plausible European
accounts of the nature of discourse that are neither ignorant, nor naïve,
nor false—stories that have respectable intellectual pedigrees dating to
Greco-Roman times and earlier. But the stories are also different. What
I want to suggest is the value of approaching the stories comparatively
and critically by reading them, along with others that are less familiar
but not less influential, within the various philosophical, rhetorical, and
linguistic traditions to which they belong. To do this kind of reading is
to achieve perspective on language use, to reflect on the meaning of
meaning, and to think about how people act when they participate in
discourse. Reading different accounts of the nature and value of discourse doesn’t in itself make us better language users, any more than
studying ethics makes us better people. But it can enlarge our knowledge of discursive ideologies—those political no less than intellectual
commitments that motivate people, including ourselves, to use language
in particular ways, react differently to the language uses of others, and
draw different conclusions about the authority, value, or significance of
language acts. On occasion, this thinking about the meaning of meaning can have not merely intellectual but also practical value for recognizing and modifying ideological convictions—changing our minds about
what we think and say and do.
Let’s explore this last point in more detail because the knowledge
available from conscious reflection on stories about the meaning of
The Meaning of Meaning 11
meaning is not as academic and esoteric as it might appear. It’s true that
everyday life, the world of George and Louise, is normally a low-stakes
environment for rhetorical reflectiveness: the casual embrace of our
personal discursive prejudices is adequate for getting through the day.
But language plays many important roles in our lives, and sometimes
the stakes are higher than merely the best interpretation of the sale date
on a milk carton. Consider the basic, and usually straightforward, act of
naming as a case in point. Naming—or representation—is one of the
most familiar and important acts that language enables us to perform,
and it is usually routine since most names enjoy broad social agreement.
Sometimes, however, names are contested, and when they are, the reason is often more than academic: the disagreements can affect people’s
lives. Louise, for example, disagrees with the letter to the editor that
names Palestinian militants as freedom fighters because she is convinced
that the militants are terrorists. George refers to the rising Hispanic population as aliens rather than immigrants. Examples of high-stakes naming abound in the world of everyday life: Is someone who reports criminal conduct a police informant or a snitch? Is a social program favoring
minority groups affirmative action or reverse discrimination? Is abortion
about the right to life or the right to choose? Is evolution about natural selection or intelligent design? Does the practice of allowing people
to choose their preferred elementary school constitute neighborhood
bonding or segregation? Was the European conquest of the American
Indian genocide or “manifest destiny”? Did the admissions policy of the
medical school at UC Davis constitute an equal opportunity program or
an unfair quota system—as the Supreme Court named it in the lengthy
text of its 1978 decision in Bakke v. University of California? (Names can
be texts of any size, not just nouns or noun phrases.) What is clear in
each of these instances is that contested naming is not a trivial debate.
How someone or something is named determines what the person or
the thing is, and participants in the debate understand that the outcome
has public consequences for how people are going to be treated, how
people will act, and how the world is going to be understood.
Contested names, like terrorist versus freedom fighter, bring into sharp
relief questions at the heart of any story about discourse. What exactly
does a name name? And what is the basis for a name’s authority? Any
such story includes a theme concerning reference, sometimes proposing, as we have already seen, that words point to worlds outside of language, sometimes contending that words constitute worlds inside the
mind, or inside language itself, and sometimes offering mediations of
these alternatives. The subtleties of reference are merely intellectual
12 C . H . K n o b l a u ch
when the name rutabaga appears on a grocery list. But names like literacy or freedom or globalization or ethnic cleansing transport the intellectual
issue into arenas of social, political, and other debate where the assumptions behind naming significantly shape the nature of public discussion.
Let’s grant Louise her contention that the Palestinians are terrorists, not
freedom fighters (since for present purposes her choice is not pertinent
to the discussion). What Louise believes about naming does not determine her view of the militants—that view depends on what she believes
about geopolitics, or about violence, or about Arabs. But it affects the
way she understands the worth or validity of her opinion, the way she
responds to alternative points of view, the willingness she may have to
reconsider her position, and the strategies she may use to persuade
others that her view is correct. Her belief may even affect the authority
she enjoys as a namer since that authority depends in part on the social
legitimacy of her belief, the number of other people who understand
the reliability of verbal statement in the same way she does. Louise is in
competition with other namers, and she can’t escape the obvious fact
that some people see the Palestinians as freedom fighters. How she (or
anyone) responds to the dissonance of contested names depends on her
assumptions, whether tacit or examined, about what names name and
how reliably they do it. Her assumptions constitute a discursive ideology
where beliefs about language support, and are supported by, the power
arrangements of public discussion.
Were Louise to consult the “anthology” of Western rhetoric, she
would discover a surprisingly rich variety of theoretical responses to the
question, what do names name? Here is an inventory of abbreviated
alternatives, each of which I will introduce more formally, in its particular narrative context, later. One response is implicit in the biblical
story of God speaking the world into existence (“God said, ‘Let there be
light’”) and then authorizing Adam to name its natural variety. Naming
is viewed here as a magical or sacred act, where a supernatural agency
composes the “presence” of reality in words. If Louise accepts this view,
then the letter writer in the newspaper is incorrect in naming the militants freedom fighters because, in effect, God has provided us with the
ability to recognize them as terrorists: the thing is immanent in the
name. A second response is that naming is an ontological act, where
metaphysical constants (Being) that underlie the world’s experiential
complexity (Becoming) make it possible to define names with philosophical reliability as they refer to things beyond language. If Louise
accepts that view, then the writer is incorrect because we know the definition of terrorist and can determine with metaphysical confidence that
The Meaning of Meaning 13
militant Palestinians fit the definition. Both magical and ontological
theories argue that names name a reality beyond themselves, but they
differ in supposing either a sacred or a rational basis for the connection. A third response is that naming entails empirical analysis, where
the gradual accretion of evidence reveals with increasing precision the
appropriateness of a particular representation. Names in this account
denote concepts—mental constructs—derived from ranges of experiential information, not fixed realities that exist prior to conceptualization.
Through observation and testing, references are established that correspond “objectively” to external experience. If Louise believes this view,
then, in principle, the Palestinians may or may not be terrorists, and
what we must do to determine the editorial writer’s objective truthfulness is gather proof of the viability of the name he prefers.
A fourth response is that naming is an imaginative act in which
human needs and predispositions invest experience with meaning.
If Louise believes that view, she is obliged to concede that the writer
is entitled to name the Palestinians as freedom fighters if his values,
assumptions, and experiences of the world make such a conclusion
meaningful. But then she is equally free, for the same reasons, to contest the writer’s opinion on the basis of her own values. Names in this
theory name mental constructs, just as they do in the empirical perspective, but the difference is that meaning is at least as subjective as it is
objective. A fifth response is that naming is a social process dependent
on the material interactions of language users who name according
to the perspectives they share. As such, naming constitutes a political
struggle, a kind of collective bargaining, in which opposing groups vie
for the authority to control a discourse. The struggle entails the exercise of power, and the group that prevails in the representation sets the
terms of meaning. If Louise believes this view, she recognizes the need
to invoke or marshal political support for her position in order to resist
and challenge the power of the newspaper account. A sixth response is
that naming is part of a language game motivated by desire and need
that enables us to create humanly satisfying illusions of coherence. The
opposition of terrorist and freedom fighter is a rhetorical fiction, intrinsically mischievous and unstable but used to manipulate debate by appeal
to a strategic binary, one term of which is privileged. If Louise believes
this view, then she understands that the letter writer’s representation
may be deconstructed, revealing the manipulative logic that sustains it,
in order to subvert a conclusion she finds unsatisfying. Louise knows,
however, that her own view is a no less bracketed and tentative judgment
because the question is ultimately undecidable by any appeal beyond
14 C . H . K n o b l a u ch
the human need to reach some psychically gratifying, albeit impermanent, closure.
Obviously, some of these accounts have enjoyed greater prestige than
others in the discursive common sense of European culture. But all of
them provide bases from which to make and appraise the value of discursive statements. If Louise were to engage consciously in a process of
comparing them, she might recognize that they offer an array of possibilities in the context of which she can identify, examine, confirm, or
reconsider the commitments she brings to the project of naming the
Palestinian militants. If she has been unreflectively assuming, for example, that the issue is settled by rational definition, grounded in a priori
judgments about the behaviors of Palestinian militants, then she’s likely
to have been comfortable in the view that the letter writer is simply illogical, failing to understand the definition of terrorist. But if she were to recognize that there are alternative possibilities, then her confidence in her
own prejudices might be harder to maintain. If Louise can understand,
say, the competing belief that names are decided by a gathering of objective evidence, then she may also be able to appreciate the reasonableness of a more tentative stance about her opinion that the Palestinians
are terrorists, reexamining both the writer’s evidence and her own.
Dissonance in that case might provide a cause for reflection. An awareness of competing perspectives may also help Louise to identify the
commitments, and the strategies of persuasion, that others might bring
to the debate. Is the letter writer implying that his meaning has a metaphysical claim to truth? Louise might have little patience with an appeal
she perceives to be based on fundamentalist conviction. And if the writer
truly believes the militants have been named by God, he is unlikely to
have much tolerance for the error, perhaps even the sin, of believing
they are other than what God has said they are. Or is the writer’s opinion
grounded in personal experience of Palestinians and knowledge of their
historical grievances? If he believes that meanings derive from subjective
as much as objective responses to the world, then discussion and subsequent new learning may be possible. Louise’s disgust at the violence and
cruelty of the militants’ actions may be set against the writer’s awareness
of Palestinian economic disenfranchisement and social dislocation in
the interest of negotiating their two points of view.
The matter is not quite as simple, however, as this mechanical illustration suggests. Stories about the nature of naming do not direct, or
even very effectively guide, people’s verbal practices. Rather, they inform
practice, comment on it, and provide perspectives from which, selfconsciously, to ratify or critique it. Their distinctive statements on the
The Meaning of Meaning 15
theme of naming, understood in the context of the whole anthology,
simultaneously make their own persuasive gestures toward believability
and offer counterpoint to the gestures of the others. Neither Louise nor
the letter writer necessarily professes allegiance to any one of the six
perspectives described above. Were Louise to appraise her position, the
reason would not be to identify herself as a card-carrying ideologue of
some particular stripe but to orient herself among possible options in a
way that satisfies her standards of intellectual and ethical inquiry. The
rhetorical perspectives represent, as an anthology, a dispersion of conceptual differences, a framework from within which to speculate about
the sufficiency of one’s beliefs and actions. Being reflective about discursive practice entails evaluating it by reference to all the stories one has
encountered about the meaning of meaning, not choosing some preferable option isolated from the dynamic of internal debate and criticism
that makes the anthology useful in the first place. On occasions when
it matters, as in the case of high-stakes naming, Louise might scrutinize
her beliefs and actions, such as her judgment about whether or not
Palestinian militants are terrorists, by recalling the implicit conversation
of the competing narratives, much as we invoke the stories of our “literary” experience in order to understand the complexities of our life experience. The alternative perspectives do not serve as orthodoxies restrictively governing the activities of language users. The fundamentalist at
Church on Sunday morning feels no intellectual inconsistency, let alone
remorse, when making a relative judgment at brunch about whether
to throw out milk that has been kept past its sale date. Meanwhile, the
relativist who finds labeling Palestinians as terrorists to be unreflective,
foundationalist thinking might not hesitate to apply a label of her own,
like fundamentalist, to the person judged to be so unreflective. Life isn’t
simple, and neither are stories. The six supposedly different narratives
I’ve proposed as an anthology of Western rhetorical theory, while plausible enough, are themselves collectively a speculative fiction, my story
about the variety of those stories.
R h e to r i c a l P e r s p e c t i v e s : R e a d i n g
High-stakes naming is only one arena in which a self-conscious awareness of beliefs about language, or the lack of self-consciousness, can have
practical consequences. Another arena is high-stakes reading, where we
are routinely required to make judgments about issues of intentionality,
the authority or status of a particular text, the ethos of a writer, and the
reliability of textual interpretation. Consider the reading of important
16 C . H . K n o b l a u ch
public documents, those afforded broad cultural or institutional significance, like the US Constitution, for example. George listens intently to
the televised grilling of a proposed Supreme Court nominee, recognizing that a battle has long raged in the congressional nominating process between those who favor strict construction of the Constitution and
those who argue for readings that adapt to changing historical circumstances. The precise theoretical issue is competing opinions about our
ability to deduce a writer’s intent. One position argues for the possibility of identifying original, and stable, meanings across time and space,
presuming that the meanings are lodged in the text itself, accessible
to careful scrutiny. Another argues that original intent is mysterious
at best, that meaning is always located in the interpretive transactions
between readers and texts in specific cultural and historical circumstances. The stakes in this case are just as high as those in high-stakes
naming: Should children be allowed to pray in public schools because
judges claim to understand the literal intent of the framers’ injunction
against making laws “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion? Should
people be denied the right to own assault rifles because judges claim
that a contemporary interpretation of “the right of the people to keep
and bear arms” must be modified to reflect the impertinence of an antiquated concept of “well regulated militia”? As in the case of contested
representations, the view a justice holds about discourse, in this case
authorial intent, does not resolve an argument about the right to pray
in the classroom or to own an AK-47; rather, it certifies the reasonableness, authority, or power of the position the judge chooses to adopt.
The strict construction argument allows us to say with conviction that
we do or don’t accept prayer in public schools because we “know” what
the framers meant. The interpretation argument allows us to say that we
do or don’t accept it because we “know” with equivalent conviction that
the constitution is a living document that must be read in the context
of contemporary values and issues. In short, beliefs about what writers,
texts, and readers can or cannot do inspire opposing frames of mind
from within which the arguments for or against school prayer are pursued and evaluated.
Another powerful contemporary example of discursive beliefs driving disputes about the authority of texts is the argument concerning the
Bible as a sacred book whose statements command assent even when
they pertain to the natural or social, not just the spiritual, world. The
discursive question in the case of a sacred book, unlike that of the US
Constitution, is not just the accessibility of authorial intent but, more
important, the ethos of the author, the status of the text as the revealed
The Meaning of Meaning 17
Word of God, hence incapable of error or misrepresentation. For some
believers, the truths of the Bible are presented literally in direct statement; for others, they derive from interpretive effort. In either case, God
and his human agents are the writers; their intentions are pure, if not
necessarily clear, and the text has a special power to enable communication between the worlds of the divine and the human. For those who
believe in the literal meanings of the Bible, even such technical questions as the age of the earth and the origins of human beings are settled
beyond any capacity to reopen them or improve upon their answers
through alternative discourses such as geology or evolutionary biology.
Even for those who assert the responsibility of readers to interpret the
sacred book, and who acknowledge a difference between metaphorical
and empirical statement, the theological, or social, or ethical meanings
available in the Bible are, in principle, discernible and have the force
of moral imperatives, once discerned, whether or not they have efficacy
in scientific or other discourses. Meanwhile, there are other possible
discursive ideologies from within which to view a text like the Bible.
The secular reader may admire and value the Bible as literature without
investing it with supernatural authority, or may acknowledge its historical interest and seek to match its stories to archeological or anthropological facts, or may criticize it as mere fable and point out its damaging
contributions to ignorance or intolerance. In each instance, the disposition to be religious or not is abetted by alternative discursive beliefs.
Let me continue to clarify the relationship I have in mind between
beliefs about words and our other beliefs, as well as our thoughts and
actions. It isn’t a person’s view about the ethos of the Bible that leads to
a decision about the truth of faith; rather, it is a commitment to belief
or disbelief that conditions someone’s understanding of the authority
of a religious text. In the same way, it isn’t a view of authorial intent that
leads to someone’s opinion about the meaning of the first or second
amendment; rather, the commitment to a particular reading is abetted
by an assumption regarding the accessibility of the Constitution’s meanings. I’m not arguing that one’s views about discourse cause other states
of belief or dispositions to act. Instead, I’m arguing that those views
play a variety of influential roles within still larger states of belief, affect
the ways in which beliefs lead to actions, and condition our judgments
about the views and actions of others. Whether we are talking about
Louise’s awareness of the alternative historical theories of representation (naming), or about George’s self-consciousness about authorial
intent, or about someone else’s familiarity with religious and secular
views of textual ethos, there are several benefits to the kind of rhetorical
18 C . H . K n o b l a u ch
self-consciousness I’m depicting. One benefit lies in what we can learn
about the motivating premises that people bring to their convictions. A
second is more reflective awareness of our own beliefs, as they may be
contextualized, and perhaps rendered more problematic, by alternative points of view. A third is the enhanced capacity to critique our own
views and even change them if and when interrogation shows them to
be faulty or insufficient. And a fourth is freedom from the tyranny of
unexamined belief, whether one’s own or someone else’s. If George
naively accepts the strict construction argument about the meanings
in the Constitution because he is not familiar with alternative points of
view, he risks intimidation by the manipulations of an appeal to higher
authority—someone’s certainty about what the framers meant. If he
naively accepts the interpretation argument, he risks falling prey to the
manipulations of an appeal to conveniently self-serving relativism, where
someone else’s conviction about the meaning of a constitutional amendment is supported by a discursive theory that allows, in principle, for as
extravagant an imposition of a reader’s will upon a text as is necessary to
make it come out right. The contention that meanings are infinitely variable is neither more nor less evidently reliable than the contention that
meanings are stable across time. Each view belongs to a discursive ideology that can marshal as many historical arguments, and that requires as
much analytical scrutiny, as its alternative.
These qualifications notwithstanding, there are some special circumstances where the relationship between a theory of discourse and the
advocacy of a position or an action is more or less directly causal. These
circumstances arise most commonly in academic debate—the work of
educators and scholars—since those who are specially versed in the language arts not surprisingly cultivate enhanced self-consciousness about
the practices of language. In academic and educational settings, the
conflicts among alternative discursive ideologies play out in the fuss and
feathers of scholarly dispute, in classroom lore and method, in pedagogical theory, in curricular decision making, and ultimately in educational
public policy. One ready example is the Great Books debate that has
raged on and off for the past century, some people arguing that certain
texts deserve iconic cultural status and others arguing that no texts offer
meanings so intrinsically stable and timeless that they must be read even
by people (often students) who fail to find them relevant or satisfying.
The underlying issue in this argument is not the problem of how things
are named, as in Louise’s view of terrorists, or the problem of authorial
intent, as in George’s thinking about the Constitution, or the question
of ethos in the Bible. Instead, it is the possibility of deriving a universal,
The Meaning of Meaning 19
reliable meaning, one to which any and all readers will assent, from the
statements of a text. After all, the argument in favor of the existence of
Great Books must depend on a degree of confidence that they offer the
same knowledge to all who read them, a knowledge about the values and
aspirations of the culture they inscribe, a knowledge of the attributes of
the hero, a knowledge of right conduct and civic responsibility, a knowledge of good and evil. And the problem we inevitably face in the effort
to sustain this confidence is the evidence from our own experience that
texts do not so readily resolve to universal meanings.
It is a simple matter to show that even the most pedestrian text can
have virtually as many readings as there are available readers. If one
were to ask a group of readers, no matter their level of skill or sophistication, to write one sentence apiece representing the essential meaning
of the paragraph immediately above, one would find versions of the following sentences, among others: Sometimes a view of discourse leads directly
to other beliefs and to actions. Academics have a sophisticated awareness of the
problem of reading. Some people believe in Great Books and others don’t. Different
people don’t get the same ideas from a given text. Great Books inscribe the culture.
We can’t believe in Great Books unless we believe in the possibility of universal
meaning. The central problem in the Great Books debate is different from that of
debates about naming or authorial intent. I know that this range is possible,
and can be readily extended, because I’ve asked readers to engage in
the exercise. So, the question is not, do readers come to different conclusions about the meaning of a text? The question is, what accounts
for the differences? And the answer to that question takes us back to
the earlier enumeration of rhetorical perspectives. Here are six ways of
accounting for the differences: (1) Some readings are wrong headed
because sin and the wiles of the devil have clouded readers’ judgments.
This is hardly a common position in secular discourse today, but it has
worked powerfully during those ages when heretics roamed the land
and in circumstances when the text at stake enjoyed greater cultural
standing than my paragraph can hope to achieve. (2) Some readings
are wrong because readers lack the training or discipline or learning or
enlightenment to identify the logical paraphrase that exists at the center of this or any text and that accounts for its coherence. (3) Different
readings are right or wrong to differing degrees, depending on readers’
familiarity with the context of the text, their knowledge of the author,
the genre, the historical moment, the texts on which this text is based,
and the prose surrounding this particular paragraph. The more reliable the contextual knowledge, the more plausible the reading. (4)
Alternative readings are inevitable, but all readings are plausible in
20 C . H . K n o b l a u ch
principle because every reader will see the text from a particular vantage point, reflecting personal experience. (5) Isolated readings inevitably vary, but meanings are ultimately social in nature, so a community
of readers, with time to compare their interpretations, can reach group
consensus that some readings are, for that group at that moment, more
acceptable than others. (6) Texts suffer from an extravagant abundance
of meaning, and any particular reading reflects the unruly play of signification, signs modifying other signs to produce psychically (not to
say practically) necessary, but also misleading and unstable, fictions of
coherence.
The interplay of these theoretical options—the conceptual constellation they define—creates the basis for competing arguments about
the Great Books, leading to their acceptance or rejection in schools, to
particular kinds of teaching (which either limit or multiply the meanings found in texts), to curricula that include or ignore Great Books,
and to public policy that ties Great Books or some other set of texts to
cultural enrichment or decay, personal growth or alienation, learning
or ignorance, and even economic advantage or decline. Feminist critics,
looking at the vast array of masculine and Caucasian authors in the traditional literary canon, have self-consciously posed arguments derived
from expressivist, sociological, and deconstructive viewpoints (about
which more later) in order to challenge cultural hegemony by representing history itself as a text, as a story of struggle in which white males,
the political winners, have written women out of the text, erasing their
writings even as they erased their bodies. The feminist critical response
has been to “revise” the text, to write women back into history by recovering long unpublished or never published women writers, by arguing
for the canonical stature of better-known women writers, by identifying
women’s ways of writing, and by subverting the canon altogether, exposing its self-justifying fictions of heritage, phallocentric superiority, and
aesthetic objectivity. Conservative cultural critics, sometimes consciously
invoking Aristotelian metaphysics, have in turn responded to such
assaults with arguments about Shakespeare’s transcendent genius, conveyed through classic works that speak to people of all times and places,
regardless of superficial distinctions of gender, race, and ethnicity. They
reaffirm the capacity of Great Books to celebrate and pass along to new
generations the fundamental verities of Western civilization. These academic arguments are not merely opinionated stances about what or
how to teach, with inarticulate assumptions about language lurking
unexamined behind the commitments. They are arguments about language itself, constituting a struggle in which discursive ideologies overtly
The Meaning of Meaning 21
display their competing claims to authority through the expositions of
literary, rhetorical, aesthetic, psychological, and educational theory.
S i x S to r i e s a b o u t D i s c o u r s e
In all these instances, then—whenever issues of high-stakes naming,
intentionality in texts, the ethos of authors, and the accessibility of textual meaning arise in public settings—an awareness of competing theoretical perspectives on language and discourse can offer not just intellectual interest but practical opportunity for more reflective thinking
and acting. So, I want to turn now to a review of six alternative Western
rhetorical theories with those advantages, practical as well as intellectual, in mind. But before elaborating the six “stories” about the meaning of meaning that I’ve sketched here in summary, let me add a few
additional stipulations and clarifications, beginning with some terms
that will come up repeatedly in the accounts to follow. By the word rhetoric I mean the theory and practice of public discourse, the arts of communication, argument, narrative, and persuasion. Western rhetoric has
two historical dimensions, one philosophical and the other technical,
to use the terminology of George Kennedy (Kennedy 1999). I will have
little to say about the latter cookbook tradition, but disappointed readers may find recipes aplenty, from the classical Rhetorica ad Herennium
to the panoply of modern composition textbooks. By discourse I mean
what Ludwig Wittgenstein (1968) meant by “language game,” a system
of conventions governing the game’s players (speakers, writers, hearers,
readers), together with the objectives, strategies, tactics, motives, moves,
and rewards that shape its play. Discourse can refer either to language
use in general or to a specific set of conventions, those governing legal
discourse, for example, as opposed to medical or scientific discourse.
Rhetoric is about discourse. By text I mean a particular language act, a
spoken or written statement that has been constructed according to the
conventions of a discourse. The history of rhetoric in Europe is notably
a history of the definitions of the word. Rhetoric has been defined very
restrictively in some theoretical perspectives, the study of “the available
means of persuasion,” for example, according to Aristotle, who limits its
domain exclusively to spoken, natural language in three discourses—
the political assembly, the law court, and the ceremonial occasion. But
it has also had all-inclusive definitions, where virtually any form of signifying activity—painting, football, cinema, mathematics, ritual, clothing
fashions, structures of kinship, dance—not just natural language activity, is regarded as discursive and therefore rhetorical. My definition will
22 C . H . K n o b l a u ch
encourage a broader range of applications (and therefore of historical
writers whose theories I’ll regard as rhetorical) than Aristotle would
have recognized, including more than linguistic signs, but it will avoid
constituting rhetoric as a Theory of Everything to preserve the hope of
distinguishing some things from others.
In the chapters to follow, I use the word story in the sense of account
more than in the sense of fiction, although I’m pleased to play on the
suggestion of fictionality that the word conveys. The six stories, or
accounts, that I will read and write (the dialectic is inescapable) cluster around a common theme, which could be expressed as a question:
what encourages us to believe that language acts are meaningful? Each
story’s answer to the question constitutes its elaboration of the theme,
its positing of what I will call a “ground of meaningfulness.” The stories constitute discursive ideologies, serving to “explain” the nature
of language and its uses, its relationships to self and world, announcing the “truths” that permit users to trust the efficacy of discourse.
The six stories are titled “Magical Rhetoric,” “Ontological Rhetoric,”
“Objectivist Rhetoric,” “Expressivist Rhetoric,” “Sociological Rhetoric,”
and “Deconstructive Rhetoric.” Their sequence should not be taken to
imply historical progression or intellectual privilege. They simply make
up my anthology. In sum, I’ll argue that discourse is meaningful in magical rhetoric because of the intrinsic power of utterance; in ontological
rhetoric because of the relationship between language and metaphysics;
in objectivist rhetoric because of the relationship between language and
phenomenal experience; in expressivist rhetoric because of the relationship between language and consciousness or imagination; in sociological rhetoric because of the material intersubjectivity of language users;
and in deconstructive rhetoric because of the situatedness of subjects
within the intertextuality of verbal statements. Each “ground” serves
to distinguish its story about the meaning of meaning from that of the
other stories, and each may also be critiqued from any vantage point
except its own.
What makes the stories important is the role they play, largely behind
the scenes, as discursive ideologies in the discourses that most matter
to us as people and citizens: religion, education, public policy, science,
law, history, and others. Magical rhetoric informs our sacred books,
the Bible, for example, or the Quran. Ontological rhetoric underlies
the inerrancy arguments of Christian fundamentalists and also the
arguments that Justice Antonin Scalia of the US Supreme Court poses
regarding “textualism,” his version of the strict construction view of
the Constitution. Objectivist rhetoric informs not only scientific and
The Meaning of Meaning 23
technological discourse but also the No Child Left Behind and Common
Core legislation that governs our schools and directs so much attention
to educational assessment. Discussions of literacy reflect the differences
among several rhetorical perspectives, not coincidentally placing different positions at loggerheads: objectivism supports “functional” literacy
arguments; ontological rhetoric informs E. D. Hirsch’s (1988) “cultural”
literacy; expressivist rhetoric underlies “personal growth” arguments;
and sociological rhetoric informs the “critical” pedagogy of Paulo Freire
(1969) and Jonathan Kozol (1985). Jean Piaget’s (2002) views of child
development are objectivist, proposing that infants begin as individual
beings and grow through education into social beings; Lev Vygotsky’s
(1962) views are sociological and propose the opposite, that infants
begin as social beings and, through education, gradually differentiate
as individuals. Historiography since the seventeenth century has been
informed by objectivist rhetoric, emphasizing the empirically based
reliability of statements about the past, but counterarguments about
the interpretative, unstable, narrative nature of history from Nietzsche
to Hayden White have proceeded from the perspective that I’m calling deconstructive rhetoric. Ontological rhetoric offer us conservative
values like social stability and enduring truth, objectivist rhetoric valorizes progress through technological ingenuity, expressivist rhetoric
emphasizes the importance of the individual and of personal liberties,
sociological and deconstructive rhetoric—more radical perspectives by
American standards—offer possibilities of political critique and social
change. In short, the different assumptions and beliefs featured in these
stories work together, and also work against each other, to create the fabric of American public discourse. The stories collectively ratify the meaning of meaning for our culture at this historical moment.
Before proceeding, however, it’s important to understand the status
of these stories. Simply put, they are my readings of a sampling of texts
from the Western rhetorical tradition and occasionally other texts (like
the Bible or Karl Popper) that some scholars might not choose to classify as rhetorical at all. I will invoke signatures from the past and present
in order to name sources from which my readings/writings derive, but I
do not contend that my stories are copies of theirs. Aristotle, Coleridge,
and Derrida have told their own stories, whatever they may be, and I
tell mine having been provoked by theirs. Including six stories, rather
than four or nine, in the anthology has been, philosophically speaking,
a somewhat arbitrary decision. It isn’t important that there are six but
only that the six are different. They are, in the ensemble, intended as a
dispersion of intellectual oppositions, linked by appeal to their distinct
24 C . H . K n o b l a u ch
ways of developing their shared theme. The advantage of the differential accounts is precisely their artificiality, their suppression of the
(no doubt numerous) conceptual overlaps one could identify among
Aristotle, Coleridge, and Derrida were one disposed to tell a story about
continuities instead. In my story, these figures are different, discontinuous, and—inevitably—simplified, offering alternative maps of a conceptual terrain that otherwise would shift and blur beyond all hope of purposeful use. Can we speak of the six stories (or, for that matter, my story
about them) as true or false? The answer, which should already have
become clear, is a decisive yes or no, depending on what one believes
about stories. Some of the six narratives about the nature of discourse
depicted here are going to take themselves more seriously, as it were,
than others do, and make claims for themselves that others do not.
The answer to a question about truth and falsity is yes if the questioner
speaks from within a more “serious” perspective that regards the question as meaningful. For example, if one agrees with the conditions of an
ontological (say, an Aristotelian) perspective, it becomes both possible
and necessary to decide the truth or falsity of other positions. But it’s
impossible, and indeed meaningless, to speak of deciding the issue from
within a deconstructive perspective, where stories amplify but neither
falsify nor displace others. My story about these stories, meanwhile, does
not claim a transcendent position outside the constellation of perspectives they depict, a seventh, master perspective kept secret throughout
discussion of the other six. My own preferred location (at the moment)
within the intertextuality of these stories necessitates conceding that
it’s impossible to remove oneself to a place outside them all in order to
judge their sufficiency. We must speak from somewhere, and any location
conditions what we are entitled to claim.
A final caveat: my anthology is necessarily limited in scope to the
extent that a project of reading Western rhetoric is plainly not a project
of reading Chinese or Arabic or Indonesian rhetoric. Wherever there is
language, there is culture, and wherever there is culture, there is rhetoric—practices of discourse. It follows that there are many stories about
the meaning of meaning not encompassed within the cultural framework of the West. The qualification is important, not only because it’s
true but also because in its truth we’re obliged to ponder the long history of colonization that Trinh Minh-ha, who will be discussed in chapter
7, attributes to Western philosophical, logical, rhetorical, and linguistic
thought. Restricting my focus to European rhetoric, as I propose to do,
arguably risks disparaging other cultural traditions by overlooking them,
or worse, appropriating them by appeal to an uncritical assumption that
The Meaning of Meaning 25
they all somehow derive from European roots. Acknowledging the diversity of world rhetorics while nonetheless restricting my focus to the West,
I hope to respect rather than erase cultural difference. It’s problematic,
on one hand, to exclude other rhetorics without implying myopia or
superiority. But on the other hand, the elaboration of a framework of
grounds of meaningfulness, understood to be saturated in the epistemological assumptions of European culture, cannot legitimately incorporate rhetorics of other cultures that aren’t similarly saturated, except at
cost of alleging the existence of rhetorical universals and creating a totalizing narrative in which some handful—however large—of chosen rhetorics becomes the master representation of World Rhetoric. Numerous
scholars, notably George Kennedy (Kennedy 1998), have written about
and continue to explore contrastive features of the world’s many rhetorics. Some have avoided the trap of totalization, although Kennedy himself, overtly pursuing the hunt for universals, has not. I commend their
efforts—Han Fei Tzu’s theory of audience in forensic oratory is not less
significant than Aristotle’s. But I also hear the stern warning of Molefi
Asante about intellectual imperialism when he insists upon the distinctively African foundations of nommo, “the generative and productive
power of the spoken word,” in The Afro-Centric Idea (Asante 1987, 17).
He joins Minh-ha in conjuring the specter of the anthropologist whose
presumptuous, all-seeing eye—the eye of European objectivism—can
recognize “other” rhetorics in no forms beyond those of the West. My
stories are local . . . as are all stories.